1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to search engine systems that provide functionality for interactively searching electronic databases of items. More particularly, the invention relates to computer-implemented methods for identifying item attributes that are likely to be important to a user who is performing a search for items.
2. Description of the Related Art
A number of search engine systems exist that provide functionality for users to search for items by specifying, or placing constraints on, values of particular item attributes. The attributes for which values may be specified or constrained are typically pre-specified by the designer of the search engine's user interface based on the types of items involved. For instance, a search interface for locating book titles may include separate search fields for “author,” “title,” “subject,” and “ISBN number.” Thus, for example, by entering the name “Krakauer” in the author field, the user can limit the search to book titles for which the value of the “author” attribute contains the name “Krakauer.”
The ability to provide useful, attribute-specific search fields in the above example exists largely because the attributes that are important to users (author, title, subject, and ISBN number) apply to most or all of the items in the domain being searched. In applications involving more diverse sets of searchable items, and thus more diverse sets of item attributes, this characteristic commonly does not exist. In these applications, the task of providing functionality for searching by item attribute becomes considerably more difficult.
As one example, an online entity that hosts an electronic catalog of products spanning a diverse set of product categories (books, music, audio equipment, cameras, apparel, software, subscriptions, etc.) may wish to provide a general-purpose search interface through which a user can run a search that spans all of these product categories. Because a high degree of product diversity exists in this example, the product attributes that will be important to the searcher will tend to vary widely according to the category or type of item sought. For example, the attribute “megapixels” may be important to a person searching for digital cameras, while the attributes of “size” and “color” may be important to a person searching for apparel items. As a result, and in view of the large number of attributes involved, the designer of the general-purpose search interface will likely have to omit “search by attribute” functionality for many of the product attributes that are important to users.